It's In The Cards: Nfl Adds 2 Playoff Spots

The NFL pulled an unexpected joker from its deck Thursday by adding two wild-card teams to its playoffs as part of a nearly $1 billion deal with ABC.

Starting with this season, the playoffs will swell from 10 teams to 12 out of the league's total of 28. Each conference will qualify three division champions and three wild-card teams.

The first week of the playoffs will involve eight teams instead of four. The two division winners with the best records in each conference will get byes on the first weekend instead of all three. The division champ with the third-best record will play host to the wild-card team with the worst record, and the wild-card team with the best record will host the wild-card team with the second-best record.

The change emanates from a demand by ABC. In addition to its Monday night games, ABC wanted something extra for the money. The agreement is that on the first playoff weekend, ABC will televise two games while NBC and CBS continue to televise one each - adding eight playoff games to ABC's 4-year package.

''Additional television revenue was an obvious factor,'' said Joe Browne, the NFL's director of communications. ''But many clubs already had expressed an interest in adding teams to the playoffs.''

Technically, the change will not be official until approved by the league's owners at their annual meetings in Orlando beginning March 12. But with the $1 billion TV contract riding on it, approval should be a formality.

The new 4-year TV contract is going to be an enormous financial boon. Besides the $1 billion pact with ABC, cable networks ESPN and TBS already have agreed to pay $450 million each to televise Sunday night games. That raises the NFL's television package to nearly $2 billion - with negotiations still continuing with CBS and NBC over TV rights for Sunday afternoons.

It appears each team will receive at least $30 million per year from the finalized TV package. Last year, each team received $17 million.

The Fox Network wanted to compete with ABC for the Monday night package but could not match ABC's final offer.

The last time the league changed its playoff format was in 1978, when it raised the total of wild-card teams from one to two in each division.

If the new playoff format had been used last season, it would have added Green Bay (10-6) and Kansas City (8-7-1) to the playoffs.

''I think it's good,'' Tampa Bay Coach Ray Perkins said. ''There's always teams that just get squeezed out of the playoffs, and this will give two of them a chance to make it.''

The NFL may get some criticism for allowing undeserving teams into the playoffs. But according to Browne, if the league had jumped from one wild-card team to three in each division in 1978, only twice since then would a team with less than a winning record been added to the playoffs - Detroit (8-8) in 1981 and Dallas (7-8) in '87.

The move comes a week after another revenue-producing step - the expansion of the season to 17 weeks in 1990 and 18 weeks the year after.

Under that change, each team will get one week off next year and two weeks off in the following years, with the extra week between the championship games and Super Bowl eliminated for 1990.